"Show me," Lou said, and Lex grabbed a pen and started drawing on a napkin, and suddenly the lounge was alive with hockey talk. Lines and formations and defensive reads and the velocity of Camille's wrist shot from the left circle. Frankie jumped in with a point about puck retrieval. Dani made a quiet observation about the Montreal goalie's glove-side weakness. Lou listened to everyone and then said three sentences that somehow synthesised all of it into a coherent strategy.
Elise sat in the middle of it and felt the gap widen.
Not that they excluded her. Camille asked her opinion on the power play formation and she gave it, and Lex nodded and said "good point" with genuine respect. But when the conversation moved on, it moved on without her, back to the game she couldn't play and the ice she couldn't touch. Lex was animated, talking about the Montreal game with a fire that said she was about to be brilliant and knew it. Camille leaned into Lou's side. Dani braided her hair with both hands, calm and fully present.
She picked at the protein bar wrapper in her lap, rolling the foil into a tight cylinder between her fingers. On the screen behind Lou's head, game footage played on mute, the Valkyries' last road win. There she was on the ice in the opening shift, number seventeen, digging a puck out of the corner with theruthless efficiency she'd built her career on. Four weeks ago. It could have been four years.
Frankie glanced over. "You okay, Moreno?"
"Fine. Just tired."
Frankie studied her. The joking energy dropped away and what was left underneath was sharper, more careful. "You'd tell us, right? If you weren't fine?"
Elise picked at the wrapper in her lap. "I'm fine, Frankie."
"Because you've got that look. The one where you're smiling but your eyes aren't in on it."
Elise forced a grin and dropped the balled-up foil wrapper onto the table. "My eyes are fully in on it."
Frankie didn't look convinced but she let it go, bumping Elise's good shoulder gently before turning back to Lex's napkin formation.
Elise stood up. "I'm going to head out. Good luck on Saturday."
"You're coming to watch, right?" Frankie asked.
"Wouldn't miss it."
She left the lounge with a wave that felt hollow and walked through the corridor toward the exit. The sounds of the team faded behind her, muffled by the closing door, and the corridor was quiet again. Her trainers squeaked on the polished floor.
Her phone buzzed in her pocket. She pulled it out.
Any dietary restrictions I should know about? — S
Sienna. Already planning the dinner. The message was so perfectly her, practical and organised, that Elise smiled despite the weight sitting on her chest.
No restrictions. Surprise me.
I'll try. See you at seven.
Elise pocketed her phone and pushed through the staff exit into the parking lot. The sun was warm on her face. The salt air carried in from the ocean, mixing with the smell of hot asphalt and the jasmine that grew along the stadium fence. She stood by her car for a moment, keys in her good hand, and let the two feelings sit side by side in her chest: the ache of being on the outside, and the quiet comfort of someone on the inside seeing her there.
Seven o'clock. Sienna at her door. Food she didn't have to cook. Conversation that didn't make her feel invisible.
She got in the car and drove home.
9
SIENNA
That evening, Sienna stopped at the Japanese restaurant three blocks from the stadium. It was a small place with a counter window and a handwritten menu and a queue that spilled onto the pavement at lunchtime, but at six-thirty the queue was gone and the woman behind the counter recognised Sienna from her weekly order.
"Extra edamame?"
"Please."
Sienna paid and stood by the window with the brown paper bag warming her hands, the smell of miso and ginger leaking through the seams. Outside, the streetlights were coming on and the sky was the deep, bruised blue of a Phoenix Ridge evening, the last light fading over the ocean to the west. A sliver of water lay between two buildings, dark and still.
She was going to Elise's apartment for dinner. She was holding a bag of Japanese food and she was about to walk four blocks to a player's home and sit on her sofa and eat and talk and be close to her for an evening that had no medical justification whatsoever.